This event, mainly organized as a different way to go through Christmas times, was on the one hand a celebration of a successful first year of activities of a new generation of Arte Utilists, but also the celebration of the official institutionalization of raum AU as an association under Slovenian law, which happened on October 7, 2009.
However, the association, up to this point only involved within cooperation’s with the public institutions, held for the first time a very own event, the “Božični StandUp: Polnočnica z Murkonom!” (Christmas StandUp: Midnight with Murko!).
As understandable, the event happened at midnight on December 24. The event location was the private garden of Rado Carlo Poggi, which could hold up to 200 people that night! The event itself was fully a success, the cooperating Čajnica, in that times operated by Jani Hercog, was happy with the traffic made, although the costs of the event, not to mention the cleaning of the next day unfortunately couldn’t be collected through voluntary contributions. Therefore, years later, thanks to Marko Kovač, Rok Konečnik, Jure Murko and Jani Hercog.
We did think that it would be difficult to motivate our public to contribute; therefore, we made the cost-structure of the event transparently visible at the entrance. It did not help that much, as our public, all grown up and educated, in a world where most art, culture and similar events were funded and organized by the state only, therefore no costs for no one.
This fundamental misunderstanding of how things work in a democratic system is actually the biggest problem any creative worker has in the post socialist orders. The individual does not simply acknowledge its role within society, consequently he does not see his obligations towards culture and society, ergo the field of culture is very much depending on passionate freelance professionals, that only hardly survive, due to lacking understatement or/and lacking funds for production.
Our prevalent young public was in its entity positively surprised, although we probably asked too much, when expecting that they would come and would contribute financially. In the end, we had to finance this project mostly from our own funds, a fact we should later on get used to when doing projects, but we just went through our first success on a popular level within the cities inhabitants.
Up to this day, this Christmas StandUp is still remembered by the inhabitants of Slovenj Gradec.
